Who

Realism

This is someone who likes whimsical videogames, who enjoys nonviolent,
nontraditional games. So it seemed to me that even if this wasn’t her cup of
tea, it would at least be worth trying. I asked her why she was so sure it
wasn’t for her.

“It’s like this,” she said. “In Kindergarten, we used to play ‘house.’ Playing
‘house’ is fun, and you and your friends take on different roles and do
different things. But inevitably, there would be that one person who took
things to a level of detail that turned a fun game into drudgery. So you’d be
playing ‘house,’ and you’d pretend to have ‘dinner.’ And then after dinner, if
that person was playing, you’d have to wash every dish. And put everything
back in the cabinets. And scrub the floor. And take out the trash. And so on.
When I look at The Sims, it looks to me like it was made by that same
person.”

This isn’t meant to trash The Sims (After all, I have already done
that.) It illustrates the
point that “realism” in games, like honesty in the face of the question “does
this make me look fat?” can be an overrated virtue.

What most game players seek is not realism, but iconic verisimilitude. You
want the game’s settings and mechanics to seem realistic, but you don’t
usually want them to actually be realistic.

Examples abound. In Electronic Arts’ Formula One racing games, you can turn
off all the driver aids and turn on realistic crashes. For most players, this
has the effect of making their car impossible to control. The very first time
they brush into another player or a barrier, pieces of their car fly off, and
their race is over. That’s “realistic” – if you’ve ever seen an F1 car lose a
wing because of contact with another car, you know this – but for the average
player, it’s not a lot of fun. Compare this with Project Gotham Racing 2, a
game that some players call realistic, in which the typical online race may
have hundreds of high speed collisions with no injuries and no retirements.

It’s not fair to simply dismiss PGR2 as “not realistic.” Rather, the effort
to create realism is concentrated in certain areas and downplayed in others.
Immersion in a virtual world is enhanced by realistically modeled
environments, noticeable differences in the handling of cars, etc. However,
there are plenty of places where realism is blown off: damage is
“realistically modeled” visually, but doesn’t make the cars harder to drive.
There are no traffic lights. You don’t get parking tickets. You don’t have to
send in monthly car payments.

Most people would distinguish Counterstrike from other first-person shooters
by describing it as “more realistic.” It has lovingly modeled weapons. Weapons
are lethal – getting shot has consequences. Dying means you are out of the
mission. You can’t magically grab a first-aid pack and be healed. On the other
hand: dying is fast - no sitting in a puddle of your own blood, gut-shot and
moaning, à la Reservoir Dogs, for 2 hours before finally expiring. There’s
no real negative consequence to being almost dead – you can lose 99 points
of “blood” and still aim just as well as when you started the round. None of
the characters faint or vomit at the sight of blood. If the hostages you are
rescuing get shot, there’s no corresponding civil suit. Apart from the
hostages, there are never any innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. You
never have to wonder if your character has adequate life insurance to take
care of the wife and three children he left behind.

And that’s OK. Just like its kissing cousin “open-endedness”, “realism” is
best used in small doses (by comparison, you’ll never hear someone say “There
was a bit too much fun in this game, for my taste.“) In the real world, there
are no second chances after death. In nearly every videogame ever made, the
character’s death is quickly followed with another opportunity to try again.
(There actually are some exceptions to this, but they are rare enough that we
can name them: Wizardry 8, The Temple of Elemental Evil, and Angband
each have an optional “ironman” mode where the death of a character is
permanent. You are not allowed to revert to an earlier save; saves in that
mode are for pausing only, not for backup. Steel Battalion for the Xbox will
delete your savegame if you die while in a mission. To the best of my
knowledge, that’s the full list of current games that try to punish you
“permanently” for dying.)

If the elements that the author brings to a videogame are ludology (the game
mechanics) and narrative (the story), what the players bring is curiosity and
a willingness to suspend disbelief. In this way, game players are like movie
audiences. Filmmakers have had decades to develop a vocabulary that is
detailed enough to create immersion but not so finely-grained that it
annihilates the suspension of disbelief with boredom (“Let’s make dinner,”
someone says, and then with just one simple cut, everyone is sitting at a
table, eating.) Game developers are still working on their vocabulary; the
medium is still in its youth. And unlike in film, where formalism without
narrative has been completely, utterly rejected by the viewing public (and has
thus become solely the realm of experimental artists), formalist games without
narrative are still among the most popular (Tetris, anyone?)

Twenty-five years ago, videogame football was three white blobs and three pink
blobs doing “the running play” or “the passing play.” Today, nearly all the
rules of the game are implemented, player movement is largely motion-captured,
and even the trappings of the TV broadcasts are imitated. But despite all this
realism, the game does not have the feel of real football. It is, to twist a
phrase of Douglas Adams’, something that is almost, but not quite, entirely
unlike football. The John Madden franchise isn’t actually a football
simulator; it’s a simulator of being John Madden.

So go ahead, model the ballistics in your game, or the ragdoll physics of one
player tackling another. Go ahead and motion capture and render the graphics
at a higher resolution. Play the explosions in surround sound. But remember,
the moment you forget that realism needs to be subjugated to the game’s fun
factor, and not the master of it, you run the risk that half of your audience
will go play Tetris or
Bejeweled
instead.